Egg Found ... View more

@BlakeRichardson wrote: @route_map  Maybe consider an MX67C for your next event, it has built in LTE. We have several of these and I'm very happy with them. I have 20 facilities and have asked that we put one in each of the ones without a 2nd WAN connection. We get 50Mbps on Verizon, but only 5Mbps on AT&T, but that's the service avaliable on AT&T in this state unfortunately.  ... View more

Stay flexible, the tried and true of building up a long term deployment is not going to work in this case at all, but make sure you use the data collected here so you can apply it to future events be they good or bad. Itll help with the guess work if you can get some sort of baseline that will likely improve the more data you can collect.   This is a outside of the box scenario and you may find going forward that running multiple smaller networks with multiple LTE internet connections is the way to go, especially in an area where you man need coverage in multiple area's but trying to cable off of 1 switch, 1 firewall, and a single internet connection is more troublesome and time consuming than it's worth.   Good luck ... View more

If I'm following this correctly the client had a single hot spot and you deployed a pair of MR33's for the users to connect, register, and download the app? If it's a similar setup, but on a larger scale then I would consider splitting the network up into multiple networks running of individual hot spots as their internet pipe. This way you would be able to split your traffic up so it's not destroying your bandwidth. Like Nolan said, your true bottleneck is when the users start blowing up the connection. At least this way you can minimize the strain somewhat. Other options would be to set bandwidth limits, content filtering out items like streaming, or outright blocking all traffic with the exception of what you need to allow for registration and app downloads. This can be noted on the splash page that traffic is limited to these items so people down bombard you with your wifi is down comments. I think the MX 64 is fine, and the single switch can even be used to split the traffic to each MX with VLANS. depending on how many concurrent users you expect to have per AP the MR 33 could work, especially if placed properly and the traffic limited to the clients needs. The more access you allow though will force you into getting larger units to handle more concurrent clients and traffic. It's a balancing act at that point, limit the Wi-Fi so people get on, register, download and disconnect or allow access to the open internet and in which case that LTE router will likely make it moot anyhow. If you have relatively good cell service in the area you can factor that in and assume some if not most will use cellular data over the free Wi-Fi, I don't recall what kind of even this was so sorry is this is a moot point out of the gate. When I travel I personally use guest Wi-Fi only when I need to use my laptop and cellular if I'm going to be there for awhile like a hotel. Just something to consider, I've been doing a lot of pre-planning using Ekahau the last few months, I can tell you what the specs are of my network, and I can get a general idea of whats in use on a daily basis for the existing Meraki network. You may have 500 people but concurrent users will be far fewer, and being connected and using data are quite different as well. 20 users connected and maybe 3 or 4 are actually going something to register use. The rest are exchanging information only when background processes are running or passing packets back and forth to keep it associated to the AP. Hope this is useful, sounds like you have a lot of guess work and eyeballing with an event like this. ... View more